Deploying lab software to students across campus at George Brown College

Watch George Brown College's customer journey

Deploying lab apps anywhere using application virtualization at George Brown College - Video Transcription

Frank Rosa:

We are a large college in Toronto, Ontario. We have approximately 28,000 students and we have a full spectrum of courses and studies. They range from health science, right into construction and engineering technologies, so we have the full spectrum. The problem we had before AppsAnywhere was two-fold. Number one was that we felt that we were limiting our students’ ability to learn. They had to go to specific physical labs to use software for their courses. The second problem was regarding improving internal efficiency to deploy software.

Benton Simon:

Our image before AppsAnywhere was around 40GB and it had all the programme specific apps loaded in them. It took around 2 hours to image one machine.

Frank Rosa:

AppsAnywhere has two huge benefits. Number one, it allows our students the ability to use their software any place, any time, so we’re essentially liberating the students from the physical labs and physical timeslots, big huge benefit. The second benefit is internal efficiency; our team could deliver applications through AppsAnywhere quicker faster than our previous methods.

Benton Simon:

It took us a day to get the service up and running. In about 4 hours we had the entire environment up and running and ready. We only had the Cloudpaging Player and operating system and Microsoft Word on it, which reduced the size to 10GB and because of that it significantly reduced the time it took to deploy the image out to all the desktops in the classrooms. Students can work on their courses out of the lab and at the convenience of their own homes.

Frank Rosa:

The main challenge in delivering apps in higher education is change itself. This is a very valuable change. It was more of an organizational/people change versus a technical change. The three words I would use to describe AppsAnywhere, the organization and the product, are: valuable, affordable, and professional.

Benton Simon:

The three words used to describe AppsAnywhere are timesaving, ease of use and reliability.